Comment by stego-tech

Something that occurred to me a while back that I can’t stop seeing is that Americans fundamentally do not expect laws to actually be enforced and will get angry if they are, even when they voted for those laws. It’s something baked deeply enough into American society that we don’t consciously notice it, but no American actually expects to actually have to follow the laws they’re voting for.

It's weirder than that. These people are all downloading porn, but they just want to rally against it to seem pious. Like the politicians voting against gay rights who are frequently discovered in restroom encounters.

I noticed that none of our human rights are actually in the Bible.

Everybody has a desired hierarchy; and you have one too. Own it; fight for it if you can; and recognize someone has to lose.

James Dobson made a career advocating for child abuse including physical abuse for “strong willed children”. Somehow it’s never Focus on the Family that these people want to ban.

The US fought a whole war with itself over whether people should be allowed to own other people. They shouldn't, we decided, except on certain circumstances.

Some parents, finding themselves owning a child, decide to push the boundaries of what they get to do with their possessions to the point that it runs afoul of other laws against how humans treat one another.

If it weren't so often about denying them medical care or a proper education or about their ability to abuse them in various ways I'd be more sympathetic. Kids have rights too their parent's don't own them to get to violate their rights just because they're their kids.

Children are human beings who need growing autonomy as they mature, not property of parents. I have several (adult, to be clear) friends who have suffered serious damage due to overly authoritarian parenting.

They are monsters because of what they will do to obtain their goals.

I mean yes, treating children as property that you control rather than people you are obligated to care for does make you a monster.

Evil little fuckers. Who even thinks that the US Federal Government isn’t totally qualified to be in complete control of their children’s education and lives, anyway? Probably some racist Ruby Ridge types (/s)

There's absolutely porn on there if that's what you're after

> And there is nothing on Blue sky that is not appropriate for children over 13-with parental guidance.

I've heard that it's full of furry porn and worse. Is that not the case?

Except “corrupting” in this case often just means “LGBTQ”. In exactly the same way “corrupting influence” used to mean “music made by black people” or “anything pro-worker”.

Corrupting ideas don’t exist. There is truly no such thing as an infohazard. We, as humans, are capable of making up our own minds about things and we don’t need to give this power of censorship over to people who are not acting in good faith.

> If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control

No they wouldn’t. They don’t want anyone accessing materials they disagree with. Having such materials available on the internet feels like a threat to themselves and their children. They don’t care about collateral damage, they just want more control.

If they had control of the school they wouldn't be talking about needing control of the school?

By "tech literate" I meant "someone with a solid understanding of technology, who is comfortable installing software and troubleshooting computer problems, and has at least a basic understanding of how computer networks work and how to manage a home lan network". Maybe "tech literate" wasn't the best term.

There’s some massive hyperbole there. “Turning an entire generation into police informants.” Sure there’s some stories about that happening but it didn’t happen enough to move the needle in terms of things that actively harmed adults.

It was harmful because it was ineffective as a mechanism to help Children not because of some nefarious motives against adults.

The same with abstinence only education. Virtually all of the harm was because it was an ineffective policy to help children, not because of some tiny second order effect on adults because children werent educating parents.

Video game regulation was primarily about adding ratings to games which again only harms adults insomuch as children are a big market so developers are less likely to make mature games.

2 of the 3 examples you gave were definitely ineffective at protecting children, but in terms of harming adults, the effects were so minuscule that if that was the goal, the supporters failed severely.

As far as age checks. We have age checks for brick and mortar stores I’m fine with age checks for websites. You also can’t display pornography in public for kids to see.

There’s nothing about “but it’s on the internet” that makes me think it’s inherently ok to treat it differently.

I think there are probably better ways to do it than this Mississippi law, and a law in a single state will probably prove ineffective in general.

Sure I’d rather address addictive app behavior as well. But algorithmic feeds are almost certainly protected under the first amendment, so good luck there.

It is. We force parents to send their children to school until they are 16 or educate them themselves—along with many other regulations on how you can raise your kids.

We also put limits on brick and mortar business to help parents. We don’t allow liquor stores to sell alcohol to kids. You could argue that parents should be the ones preventing their kids from buying alcohol, and requiring everyone to submit ID in order to prevent underage drinking is the state doing parent’s job for them.

Find yourself on the bad side of child protective services (rightly or wrongly) and you'll discover rather quickly how hard the government can come down on your rights as a parent.